Looking for more information about Edit Grinsphun?

Other Websites

Stories

Sort

Edit Grinsphun

March 2, 1922
—Chisinau, Romania

Edit, the eldest of two children born to a Jewish family, was raised in Bulboaca, a Romanian village of 2,000 people. Her father was a farmer, and he also worked in the town's railway office. Edit attended public school for four years and then, at age 11, went to the nearby town of Bendery for high school.

1933-39: In Bendery, my parents rented a room for me near the school. We studied several foreign languages, but we weren't taught politics--they said that politics was bad for our minds. In 1937 a fascist government came to power in Romania and pogroms against Jews broke out. At school, a list of Jewish students was made in preparation for purging the school of Jews. But King Carol II ousted the fascists before we could be expelled.

1940-45: When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, I fled east, but the Germans overtook me in Pervomaysk. For months I hid, and then crossed a frozen river to the Romanian-occupied side. Barefoot, I traversed the ice on my hands and knees. Several more months passed, and I began to feel that I couldn't go on running and hiding. I approached a Romanian policeman: "Do what you want. I don't have the guts to kill myself." He replied coldly, "There's a death camp at Otmechetka, but it's not finished. I can't send you yet."

Edit was deported to a forced-labor camp in Transnistria. She was liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, Edit lived in Odessa. She emigrated to America in 1990.